


Once Upon a Time

by lady_ragnell



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: 5 Things, Character Study, F/M, Fairy Tales, Gen, M/M, Podfic Available
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-20
Updated: 2012-11-20
Packaged: 2017-11-19 02:55:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/568273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lady_ragnell/pseuds/lady_ragnell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles doesn't know what his story is, but he knows he's in one.</p>
<p>(Or: five fairy tales Stiles isn't the hero of, and one he might be.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Once Upon a Time

**Author's Note:**

> Because much as I love Little Red Riding Hood, there are all sorts of other fairy tales to play with. Also, a lot of this may be an excuse for the last line.

**Little Red**

Everyone always forgets that Scott was the first one to wear a red hoodie and meet the Big Bad Wolf.

Sure, Stiles sometimes wears one too, and sure, he’s the human always getting led astray by wolves, but he doesn’t really think he’s Little Red Riding Hood, not even when everyone jokes about it whenever he wears red. That’s Scott—off the beaten path in the woods (Stiles isn’t sure if this makes him or Laura Hale Granny, but whatever, the analogy doesn’t have to be perfect) with his red hood a beacon for the Big Bad Wolf, setting it all in motion.

Sometimes, when all the werewolf stuff is going to shit, Stiles wonders if maybe he’s the wolf, a little, since it was his fault Scott was out in the woods that night, but then again, nobody can contest that Peter Hale fills those shoes pretty well. Better than Stiles. My, what big teeth he has.

There’s even Allison to be the woodcutter who saves Little Red. She’s the one who shot the arrow that took out the Big Bad Wolf (well, the first time, anyway, because if Stiles’s life is a fairy tale, it’s definitely not the Disney kind), and she’s the one who keeps saving Scott and keeping him human, no matter how many times they break up and get back together. She’s probably the closest thing to happily ever after Scott’s going to get.

So yeah, Stiles isn’t Little Red Riding Hood no matter what anybody says. He’s not sure what he is, but that’s not his story.

**Beauty and the Beast**

Not that Stiles wants to be the prettiest princess, but he could live with being Belle. Belle is kind of a badass monster-tamer, and Beacon Hills could use some of those these days. And if she tames a monster with love, then okay, he could live with that. Everyone involved in the werewolf mess is sort of ridiculously hot.

(And if he is Belle, the most likely candidate for the Beast he keeps coming back to is Derek, and he doesn’t know what to do with that. If nothing else, he’s not sure it’s Derek’s story either, not really.)

After the whole deal with Jackson coming back from the dead and Lydia hugging him and magically turning him from a kanima into a werewolf, though, that spot is kind of taken.

Stiles isn’t one to get in the way of actual fairy-tale love, so by way of a peace offering after everything dies down, he leaves a Belle pencil case in Lydia’s locker, because if anybody is getting a Disney fairy tale it’s Lydia and Jackson (damn it). She literally saved him with the _power of love_.

Lydia, because she is terrifying, appears at his table in the library brandishing it and looking displeased several hours later. “Not funny.”

“Come on, it’s a little funny. Besides, Belle is the smartest princess!”

That gets him treated to a ten-minute lecture on Disney and sexism, but Stiles just grins at her until she finishes and deflates, ever so slightly. “I may see the parallels, but if you tell anyone else that I will make your life a living _hell_ ,” she promises, and storms off. She keeps the pencil case.

If Stiles is Granny or maybe partially the Big Bad Wolf for Scott, he’s probably Chip for Lydia and Jackson, which is too depressing to contemplate. So that’s not his story either.

**How Six Traveled Through the World**

Considering all the werewolf research Stiles ends up doing, he runs across a lot of fairy tales, so he keeps thinking about it, even when they don’t pertain directly to him. When he runs across _How Six Traveled Through the World_ it seems pretty werewolf-relevant, considering it’s basically about a bunch of dudes with superpowers (even if they’re weirdly specific ones) hanging out, tricking kings, and being together forever.

As the pack comes together and Derek gets his Alpha shit together, Stiles thinks about the fairy tale sometimes as it applies to all of them, but mostly to Isaac and Boyd. They’re the ones who seem happiest with the group banding together, even if Boyd is pretty quiet about it. Or maybe not the happiest, but the two where Stiles can look at them and think _maybe this makeshift family-cum-pack is their version of happily ever after_ , or the closest to it anyone can really get.

It makes Stiles happy, having a pack, but he doesn’t think that’s the point of his story.

**The Little Mermaid**

Erica’s always a little shaky after full moons, so Stiles usually tries to hang out with her for a while the morning after. “Sometimes I have to remind myself it was worth it,” she says one month, curled up on Stiles’s bed with her biology textbook. “Things were awful before, I’m glad I did it, but …”

“In the original version of the Little Mermaid,” Stiles says, not even thinking about it until he says it, “it hurt her to walk. She wanted to be human but she felt like she was walking on knives whenever she used her legs.”

She scowls at him. “Yeah, and she also gave up her whole life for a guy.”

“She decided she wanted to change her life, and did it,” he corrects, because he doesn’t want to touch the whole Derek deal with a ten-foot pole. There are things he doesn’t want to know, things they’re all trying to leave behind now that they’re trying to be a real pack. “And it wasn’t always great, but it was what she wanted, and she kept her sights on that.” She also died in the end, but that is also a sore subject so he is going to steer clear.

“This isn’t a fairy tale,” she grumbles, but her shoulders relax and she uncurls just a little bit.

“Werewolves,” he reminds her, and she makes a face. “I could believe a lot of things now, fairy tales do not even make the list of weird.”

It takes a second for a grin to break out. “So that makes Lydia and Jackson Belle and—”

Stiles laughs. “I know, right?”

“And you’re …”

He shrugs. “The Flounder to your Ariel?” Little Mermaid isn’t really his story, or one he’s ever thought about for himself. Maybe if he’d accepted Peter’s offer of the bite back at the beginning, it would be, but it’s not now.

“I don’t think so.” She hums and gives him a long look. “I guess we’ll just have to see.”

**Snow White**

Derek’s in some of the fairy tales Stiles sees around him (sometimes he’s the Big Bad Wolf, sometimes he’s the prince), but none of them really seem like _his_ until Stiles sees him after a vicious fight with another Alpha, wiping blood from his mouth, and thinks _lips as red as_ —

The thought of Derek being a fairytale princess is enough to make him snort and he ignores it for a while, but Stiles has never been able to _stop_ thinking something after he starts.

Derek isn’t sleeping, he’s not in some glass coffin, but he’s so cut off, even with the pack around him, that Stiles decides it can count as a parallel. Kate Argent is the evil queen in this one, no question, and Peter’s probably the huntsman, even if he made worse choices than the one in the original story. Life’s knocked Derek back again and again and he’s shut down, even if he’s got his dwarves in the form of a werewolf pack around him.

Stiles figures he’s one of the dwarves (maybe Dopey, though Derek’s life isn’t the Disney version of _anything_ so at least he’s spared that indignity). He’s everyone else’s goofy sidekick, anyway, even if none of those castings fit as well as he feels like they should.

He figures he’s one of the dwarves right up until he kisses Derek one late night when they’re the only ones awake and Derek is looking so stony and pathetic that Stiles has to do _something_. But instead of pushing him off, explaining all the reasons it’s a terrible idea (because it really, really is, but Stiles is the king of terrible ideas, it’s how he got himself and Scott into this mess in the first place), Derek grabs on and kisses him back so fiercely Stiles worries his lips will bruise. It’s like he’s unthawing, or—waking up, Stiles supposes, which makes him Prince Charming. Not that he can explain that to Derek.

In the morning, Erica grins and raises her eyebrows like she’s remembering their conversation about fairy tales, and Stiles shrugs. He may be Derek’s Prince Charming, which is both and awesome and really surreal feeling, but that’s not _his_ story, that’s just who he is in Derek’s.

It’s still pretty awesome, though, and it’s not like he needs to be in more of a fairy tale than he already is, so Stiles decides to forget about it.

**… And One More**

The whole pack gets kidnapped by fairies, because apparently this is Stiles’s life now.

Not the Tinker Bell kinds of fairies either, but the Seelie-and-Unseelie gorgeous-and-terrible kind, and Stiles has detention with Harris for probably the three hundredth time so he misses the kidnapping, which means he’s on automatic rescue duty. So he arms himself up with everything he can think of and goes to the last place the GPS on Scott’s phone shows.

He takes out three fairies with a crowbar and some mountain ash before they take him to their queen, who has his friends caged up hanging off the ground. Stiles ignores Derek telling him to go back and get backup or let them save themselves or something (because yeah, that’s going to happen) and glares at her. It’s probably not very impressive, but it’s something. “Give them back.”

The fairy queen goes so far past being beautiful that she actually hits the mark around “terrifying.” More than Lydia, even. “And why should I?”

Turns out reading fairy tales is more useful than he thought it would be. “You would have done something to them already if you weren’t willing to strike a deal.” He casts around for one of the classics. “How about this: I ask you a question. You give the right answer to my question and you get me too. If you can’t answer, you give them back to me.”

“You think you have a riddle I can’t solve?”

And oh, there’s only one answer to give to that, and _this_ is a fairy tale he can do. He may not be able to spin straw into gold, but he can spin words, turn research into plans, and that’s all the story he needs to save his friends, his pack. “I think so.”

“What is it, then?”

Stiles grins and folds his arms across his chest. “Guess my name.”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Once Upon a Time](https://archiveofourown.org/works/585551) by [kalakirya](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalakirya/pseuds/kalakirya)




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